Rei Kawakubo has said that if she could have invented one garment, it would have been the white shirt. "It's a fundamental part of a man's wardrobe," her husband, translator, and company CEO, Adrian Joffe, said on her behalf. "Shirt, jacket, and pants are the fundamental basis."

Conveniently enough that's what Comme des Garçons Shirt makes, with an emphasis on the titular shirts. The line, the only Comme des Garçons collection made entirely in France, represents a third of the label's menswear: There's Homme Plus, the "engine," which is given pride of place among the three on the Paris runway; Homme Deux, the more office-friendly line of slightly twisted classic styles; and Shirt, which functions as the baby of the house and often as an entry point to its esoteric sensibility. (At 23 years old, though, the baby has outlasted plenty of its competitors and is now in a comfortable adolescence.)

Shirt's small show, held the day after Homme Plus, offered its seasonal variations on its fundamental theme. For Fall, pants were uniformly cropped or rolled, shirts shown entire; the sense pervades that tucking one in would amount to a violation. (CDG is nothing if not strict in its preferences.) They are detailed with patchworking, ruffles, double plackets, and bubble-shaped appliqués that called to mind some of the details of the Homme Plus collection. The two lines are entirely distinct, Joffe said, but they do often connect with one another. "She's the same person," he said with a shrug.